The Alaska Highway

Days 8-10

We've spent the last few days on the AlCan highway travelling through Canada's Yukon.

The Alaska Highway, or AlCan as it's known locally is actually quite an amazing thing. You can see for miles around, and there's no sign of human trace anywhere – it's utter wilderness. Then you take a look at the map and you realise that in fact there's nothing at all for hundreds if not thousands of miles in any direction – not a road, cable, pipe, building, track – nothing at all. And then we learnt how the road came to be: all 1400 miles of it were first carved out in just 8 months in 1942. All just staggering really.

The road is mainly pretty good these days, with just a few strong winds to watch out for. However when we stopped at a cafe for lunch one day we learned that two motorcyclists had died over the last two weeks on the 200 mile stretch we'd just done. Probably road bikes travelling too fast over gravel sections, but it's a good reminder to take it easy!

We're now in Watson Lake, home of the signpost forest (tens of thousands of signs – see photos). The mosquitoes are bad here, and even the birds started dive bombing us over breakfast so we'll be moving on tonight. Our only disappointment so far (except for the mosquitoes) is that we haven't seen any bears! We met some people who saw 8 bears on the stretch we'll do today, so let's see if we have any luck...